Just about ten years ago, sometime shortly after the inception of The Hood Internet, the music blog Idolator wrote a thing about the death of mashups: they were over. No more novelty pairings, no more awful portmanteau “song titles” etc etc etc, all the other justifiable critiques. (The site has since changed owners— search “idolator” and “mashup” now, and that piece won’t come up at the top. What will are a variety of recent-ish clickbait articles that probably boil down to something like: you wouldn’t think this mashup would work but,,,, it does)

The Hood Internet was also a music blog, but of the hard-copy mp3 variety. For the first few months of its existence, we’d crank out near-daily pairings of (primarily) rap and hip hop vocal tracks mixed atop instrumental edits of songs we’d made from our individual music collections, which at the time skewed towards modern electronic and indie rock. So, you know … mashups. These 192-kbps heaters were always accompanied by Photoshopped collages of the sampled artists appearing together. CONTENT!

We finished the first Hood Internet mixtape— a best-of what we’d made thus far— days before our first live show, which was less of a show and moreso lowbrow performance art: we blasted The Mixtape Volume One through the venue’s in-house mixer, and pretended to load vinyl records into our laptops for an hour.

OK soooo fast forward through the past ten years: we made hundreds and hundreds of bootlegs (look at that: “bootlegs.” such a cooler word than mashup, ew). The better ones got compiled into our loosely annual mixtape releases, which racked up millions of downloads worldwide. In addition to all those BOOTLEGS, we also made and released our own remixes, original songs and collaborations with other artists we liked. We learned how to mix live sets from our growing catalog without trainwrecking too hard, and eventually got to do shows all over North America pretty regularly, sharing the stage and touring with a bunch of great artists. Even had a few international jaunts in there! Not quite EDM superstars, but.

It’s now 2017 and here we are with The Mixtape Volume Ten, aaaand wait. What’s with the subtitle— Best of The Hood Internet— is this some sort of greatest hits album from, uh, a website that DJs? Really? Yes. It is exactly that. Much like the first mixtape was a best-of everything we’d made to that point, this ten-year retrospective is 50 of our best blends (blends! there’s another synonym for you) from the catalog that we’ve willed into existence over the last decade. Listen to it, enjoy it or hate it, and together let’s all mourn the ten-year anniversary of the death of mashups.